About Singing

I ended my last blog with these words: “And it’s even more difficult with singers!” I should quickly add, it’s even more rewarding with singers, too. Well, neither of those statements is completely true, but…

Anyone can sing, right? My email signature has a wonderful Aristotle quote: “Although nature has gifted us all with voices, correct singing is the result of art and study.” Correct singing, not just singing. I might add, expressive singing.

Ever hear a bunch of people singing Happy Birthday? Perhaps those bands of waitresses and waiters in a restaurant bringing a cupcake with a candle, looking completely bored at doing it yet again. Would you pay $25 to hear them sing on the stage of Troy Music Hall? Pleasant singing, perhaps (sometimes not!), but neither correct nor art.

Let’s be blunt. Singers can learn tunes far more easily than instrumentalists. We all learned “Happy Birthday” or “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” without any difficulty, and we didn’t have to worry about where our fingers go, what to do with the bow, how to hold our lips to blow into the flute/clarinet/horn/tuba. Except for the very rare tone-deaf person, learning a tune is easy. Singing it well is another story.

A 5-year-old can buy a nice violin or piano and start to study, and the instrument is all ready to make a beautiful sound. Give a kid a Steinway and it sounds like a Steinway. But a 5-year-old singer doesn’t have a ready “instrument” yet. That “instrument” will take years until it becomes a Steinway. The body will change drastically over the first 20+ years of life. (Male singers will go through an even more radical change at puberty.) The “instrument” isn’t really ready to “play on” for the first 20 years. By the age of 16 a kid like my pianist daughter Katy will have had ten years of lessons, learning to use her fingers and hands and all that, but she is just beginning to study voice, and her voice is just beginning to mature.

For this reason, BTW, I never recommend voice lessons for children before high school, and then only with a very fine teacher who understands the developing voice. Oh, children can learn things about breathing and vocal production and mouth shape and vowels, but they can’t really work on their “instrument” because they don’t quite have one yet. The only good news is that the vocal “instrument” costs a lot less than a Steinway!

And yet these days there are plenty of “child prodigy” singers out there singing pop music and even some classical music and sounding “great.” But most of them are pushed too far and too fast, and wind up having extremely short careers. Remember Charlotte Church, a teenager about five years ago who took the vocal world by storm? Anyone hear anything from her since? The young voice is a delicate instrument, far from mature. It’s like Schroeder’s toy piano in “Peanuts.”